Word: raff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Raff grew up in the southern Italian village of Melito Irpino, one of those timeless, unchanging communities that hide behind hills all over Europe. Even there, he was something of an outsider: a U.S. citizen by virtue of his father's naturalization years before in America. The 30-year disparity in his parents' ages did not contribute to a settled home life. Papa Minichiello, a stern disciplinarian, confined his son at home nights. The one time Raff defied this parental decree he was soundly beaten...
...when Raff was 13, Papa Minichiello moved his family back to the U.S. and settled on a farm outside Seattle, where the old man had relatives. The abrupt transition was traumatic for Raff. He could neither speak nor read English. Classes at Foster High School became a routine torture; he fell hopelessly behind and, without his father's knowledge, regularly played hooky...
...Raff dropped out of school for good. A young man who had never dated a girl, he found a job polishing and arranging fruit in a Seattle supermarket and took some satisfaction in it. But his failure in school, tugging remorselessly at his conscience, drove him to the Seattle public library. For hours on end, unable to fathom the printed mysteries of its stacks, he pored over the illustrations. In a way that he still does not understand, pictures of airplanes and weapons of war fascinated him. And his thoughts slowly turned to the other culture of modern society where...
After Camp Pendleton, where helpful Marine buddies polished some of the rough edges off his English, Raff was sent to Viet Nam in December...
Almost immediately he launched a private war of his own. Cast in with veterans who sang the praises of pot and the hippie life, Raff voiced his objections to these values. When the other Marines responded by jeering at his English and his ancestry, Raff chose one of them and savagely attacked...